Debunking biofuel

From
Tim Joslin

You go some way towards debunking the fallacious reasoning used to justify biofuels as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions (15 December 2007, p 6 and p 3) – but there is more.

The net greenhouse gas saving for current biofuel crops in temperate regions is not more than a tonne of carbon per hectare per year – and is sometimes negative. But we need to take account of the opportunity cost of the land on which biofuel crops are grown. Reforestation, for example, could remove at least tens of tonnes of carbon per hectare from the atmosphere&colon; so the …